Suzy Cube Update: April 28, 2017

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

Ok, here we go, a half decent update, finally! Though most of my week was flushed down the annoying bugs drain, I did manage to make some demonstrable progress. Let's dive in!

Publisher talks continue though I still have nothing to announce. In fact, I think I'm going to stop bringing it up until I do have something concrete to share. Moving on!

On A Roll

As I started design sketches for Level 4-4, I realized I was going to need a greater variety of rotators in order to better set this new level apart from the, admittedly, quite similar Level 2-2, which is also a lava themed level full of rotator blocks.

Piece of cake!

As you can see, these rotators (sped up to make for a shorter gif) come in a variety of shapes and exhibit different behaviours.

Much like the simpler boxy rotators from Level 2-2, the collisions for these new rotators are handled by a complex arrangement of box and capsule colliders. Just check out this piece!

Thems lotsa colliders!

I know primitive colliders are generally faster and more reliable than mesh colliders, but I wonder if I'm approaching a point of diminishing returns...

Not content with simply creating some new rotator shapes to give Level 4-4 its own flavour, I decided to dive in and write a script to handle rolling blocks. I plan on using these both as tricky rolling platforms and as spiked hazards! So, yesterday, I dove into implementing these. For anyone wondering, it's not as trivial as it may seem! Here is what I had by the end of the day:

(Sorry for the small size, Unity Answers has a strict upload limit on attachments...)

As you can see, the cube seems to roll fine in one direction, but spins along the wrong axis in the other direction whenever the cube isn't starting in its original orientation. I'm still fighting with this one and invite anyone who thinks they can help to chime in on the Unity Answers page.

Careful With That!

Earlier this week, I took a break from bug fixing for a day or so to implement a long deferred hazard. I call them Spinner Pucks!

Seems perfectly safe

They can be activated and deactivated by jumping on the button. Activating one of these bad boys sends it spinning and bouncing off nearby obstacles.

Spin my pretty! SPIIIIN!!!

They can be quite dangerous but useful too as they make short work of any enemy unfortunate enough to get caught in their spinning spikes. Oh, and they can pick up coins for Suzy too! Just, lookout for those rebounds.

Yay! Aw...

I had to rework some stuff to allow them to interact with pickups and other things (ooh?), but I'm sure it will be worth it in the end as their bouncing behaviour will, no doubt, open up the possibility for fun chaotic situations.

Muahahaha!!

I Need an Exterminator

Aaand, finally, I STILL have not been able to fix my stupid crashing bug from a couple weeks ago. I was sure I had found the offending script as disabling it gets rid of the crash, but the same script, in a similar test scenario does not cause a crash... So... I dunno. I'm thinking more and more that the bug may, in fact be Unity's fault. Maybe I should file it with them.

Well, that's it. I was not able to clear my list for this week, mostly due to the crash and rolling block bugs, but, at least I'm not going to be carrying too many things into next week. Ciao!